First of all, could you briefly describe your training, between Valencia (Spain) and London (UK), particularly the aspects you think have marked your work?
After studying Fine Arts in Valencia, where I lived for 10 years, I moved to London to do an MFA at Goldsmiths. In terms of education, the two experiences were very different. The most obvious difference is that the Spanish system is still linked to a very traditional artistic education, whereas in the UK it’s taken for granted that what art schools teach is contemporary art, regarded as post-conceptual, a kind of art that doesn’t go back much further than 50 years. This means two totally different approaches. On the one hand, the level of involvement with work in critical and theoretical terms is much greater, more rigorous and in touch with the present moment on a course like the one at Goldsmiths. You really appreciate that coming from a Spanish degree, as well as the fact that it’s very much geared to the particular interests of each student. It also has its downsides, though. In terms of education, it’s a paradigm example of the type of mentality that tends to ignore everything that happened before modernity—in this case, late modernity, as there’s practically no room even for the historic avant-gardes. For undergraduates, it’s as though almost nothing artistically relevant occurred before Robert Smithson. Then, practically all the emphasis is on the discursive aspects of the work, and there’s a kind of tacit disregard for the aesthetic dimension of the artwork. Personally, I think this is representative of contentious issues in the field of contemporary art that go beyond education. We have to remember that its assessment criteria are based on the beliefs of the English-speaking world: a radical distinction between body and mind, along with a rejection of aesthetics; a kind of politically correct—but hypocritical—austerity that is seen as intrinsically positive. Personally, I feel the time has come to propose alternative models, as the current one has ultimately produced an elitist form of art that is quite separate from society, a rather grudging art that takes refuge in political slogans and forms part of the commercial machinery. Remember, it was also English-speaking countries that invented capitalism.
On the degree course in Valencia, where I studied painting, it was almost the opposite: scant contact with the cultural present and an almost exclusive emphasis on technique. In many senses it was an anachronistic education. But it did give me the chance to concentrate on a specific medium and develop a profound relationship with a language. Over the years I’ve exchanged painting for photography and then audiovisuals, but I’ve kept that concentration on language.
I feel lucky to have such different experiences, and I think that the future—in many other fields, too—should move towards the integration of models.

In your work we see a tension between “the old and the new”, analogue and digital. We’re also intrigued by the passage from real image to digital animations, involving new tools. How has your way of working changed?
Yes, there is a tension there. There are two fairly clearly defined phases in my work: from 2006 to 2011, and from 2011 to the present day. The first phase—which ended with LOSS—looked very closely at the idea of audiovisual recording as ruin and the way in which the human tendency to create mental images and remember had an industrial correspondence throughout the 20th century, in audiovisual recording and reproduction technologies. That led to a particular emphasis on the analogue technologies of that time, and their obsolete nature.
In the work I’ve produced since 2011, especially since 2013 with the introduction of digital animation, the tension you mentioned is sometimes less explicit, but sometimes even more so: analogue devices tend to have disappeared and be replaced by digitally generated images. This language is related to the present and to the visualization of future projects—which is what this technology was originally invented for. It’s a malleable type of language that basically lets you create plausible images from ideas, introducing parameters by means of which the computer constructs images. Personally, I’m interested in its potential to create new, seamless visual links and elements that shape our contemporaneity, which, due to production and organization systems, are presented to us as disconnected and alienated from their origins, perhaps in a distant country or age. It’s a kind of language that allows you aesthetically to recreate a time-space continuity that the aesthetic experience of the kind of society we live in tends to fragment, making reality hard to understand.

Political issues have made their way into your work. Is this a recent development, or have they always been there?
They’ve always been there to some degree since I started working with video, but perhaps they’ve become more explicit in recent years. I tend to think that working to give a considered, personal viewpoint of the reality you experience, and trying to make it comprehensible to others, is intrinsically political; for me, that’s what making art or cinema is all about. That’s why it seems inevitable that “politics” should have appeared more obviously in recent years. Apart from that, I’m rather tired of the way the label “political art” is used; it’s gone wild, like a commercial label. In the present-day situation, it might be more effective to leave behind the political correctness and do something more “irresponsible” and more popular that has the potential to move people. The art that has most changed my life is rarely explicitly political.

You move between two circuits that sometimes seem mutually exclusive: the ART institution (galleries and museums) and the CINEMA institution, such as film festivals. What differences do you see, for example in the way your work is received?
In general, mostly because of my training, I’m much more familiar with the contemporary art world. I have shown my work at film festivals, in the experimental sections. Actually I don’t take part in festivals as much as I should, mostly because I’m not as familiar with the circuit and I’m rather absent-minded about the dates. But I do think it’s good to step outside the world of contemporary art, which tends to work with a series of rather strictly defined values, and there’s a degree of complicity that is not always positive; sometimes it accommodates things that people outside the contemporary art would wouldn’t swallow—and with good reason. Conversely, I do feel that the world of what we might call conventional cinema—even sometimes experimental film, though obviously less so—is excessively bound to accepted forms and is more conservative. Of course, I may be wrong.